US Jennifer Valente, US Sarah Hammer, US Chloe Dygert and US Kelly Catlin cycle to gold in the Women’s Team Pursuit final during the 2016 Track Cycling World Championships at the Lee Valley VeloPark in London on March 4, 2016 / AFP / Eric FEFERBERG (Photo credit should read ERIC FEFERBERG/AFP/Getty Images)

Kelly Catlin is one of few kids whose parents encouraged her not to go to college.

Catlin faced a decision in December 2014 — go to college at the University of Minnesota or put life on hold to pursue a potential Olympic opportunity with USA Cycling.

“She really debated long and hard about whether to put college on hold. Was it worth it? What if she didn’t make it? Blah, blah, blah,” said Catlin’s mother, Carolyn Emory. “And we were convinced that, ‘Hey, this is a great chance; it may never come again. Go for it. What the heck.’ ”

“Which was a very odd perspective to get from one’s parents,” Catlin said, “but it was a good one.”

United States’ Kelly Catlin pedals during the women’s individual time trial cycling competition at the Pan Am Games in Milton, Ontario, Wednesday, July 22, 2015. Catlin won the gold medal in the event. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana)

Twenty months later, Catlin is in Rio de Janeiro competing for the U.S. pursuit cycling team with a gold medal in sight. Qualifications for the event start Thursday.

That’s an impressive standing for anyone, let alone an athlete who first picked up the sport in 2014.

A 2014 Mounds View High School graduate, Catlin was an elite road racer who excelled for Roseville High School’s mountain biking team in high school. It was her coach at Roseville, Doug White, who encouraged her to compete in a large road stage race. It was there that Catlin was discovered by USA Cycling, who wanted her to attend a track cycling Talent ID camp at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colo.

“(Riders) go through a barrage of testing,” she said, “and getting used to the track, if you hadn’t ridden the track before.”

How did Catlin do?

“I thought I was terrible,” she said. “I was really convinced they’d be like, ‘Oh, you suck.’ ”

That’s Catlin, who, her mother says, “doesn’t like to toot her own horn,” despite succeeding in nearly everything she tackles. She also was the first chair violinist at Mounds View and graduated high school with about 80 college credits.

Catlin, 20, her brother, Colin, and sister Christine are triplets. The three are close — Emory said they bounce ideas off one another more than their parents — but Kelly Catlin has always been motivated to distinguish herself, even in elementary school.

“A lot of kids might make a diagram or do a paper,” Emory said. “Her presentation would have a paper, but she would construct these amazing, 3-D objects. She made a Sputnik (model) one time, for a presentation on the Cold War. A model of Sputnik. You had to go around collecting car antenna, and she’d put it on a tripod and inside she had a tape recording of the beeps that Sputnik used to make and also some of the kind of Russian Mission control stuff as her presentation. So, that was kind of different.”

Emory said her daughter is good with her hand, as adapt at art and working on her bicycle.

So what isn’t Catlin good at?

“Patience,” her mother said.

Which is fine, because it doesn’t take Catlin long to learn anything, including the intricacies of track cycling. At first, she found the sport “terrifying,” which was part of the attraction.

“It’s fast and scary,” she said. “It was definitely challenging at first, so I liked that.”

Still, Catlin said, she felt like “a pretender” in the sport until the 2015 Pan American Games, where she was on the U.S. team that claimed silver.

“Once I finished that race, I was like, ‘OK, I can actually race in team pursuit. I feel much better about myself now,’ ” Catlin said. “But it is definitely a continual learning experience, because as we get faster and faster, things have to be adjusted. It’s very much a constant learning curve.”

Catlin and her teammates travel around the tilted Velodrome at speeds of about 50 mph, just inches in front of and behind one another. Her description of track cycling isn’t romantic.

“(It’s) a lot more about suffering, I guess, because the physical strength of it is a very large component,” she said. “It’s about going as fast and as hard as you can without falling over, basically.”

Kelly Catlin with Kakookies Collegiate All-Stars gets ready for her introduction at the North Start Grand Prix women’s bike race though downtown St. Paul, Wednesday June 11, 2014. The 18 year-old from Arden Hills just graduated from Mounds View High School and is attending the University of Minnesota in the fall. (Pioneer Press: John Autey)

As for the feeling Catlin gets when competing, she wanted to use the term “magical,” but the pain involved kept her from doing so. Instead, she chose “meditative.”

“A lot of books talk about this idea of flow, where when your ability to meet a challenge just meets the demand,” Catlin said. “I feel like it’s the perfect state of flow, where it’s extremely challenging but you’re just able to do it and there’s no room for anything but focusing on each pedal stroke. So nothing else in the world exists, and you can’t even tell time is passing, it’s just so fully occupying.”

Catlin and Co. enter Rio as the defending world champions, having made a swift climb through the international ranks in the past year-plus. For the first time since Catlin has been with the team, the U.S. isn’t an underdog.

The key to this team’s success, she said, has been the group’s diversity, with riders of different ages, backgrounds and experience. Some riders have been in track cycling for about 15 years. Catlin is the greenest of the group.

Two weeks after Rio, Catlin will be back in school at Minnesota. She’s majoring in mathematics and Chinese with post-graduate plans for medical school or a Ph.D. in theoretical mathematics.

Even with her U.S. Cycling stint, the not-so-patient Catlin still expects to graduate in May of 2018 — still right on schedule with the traditional four-year plan — if not earlier.

But before all of that, Catlin will truly perform on the world stage.

“So I think it’ll be very transformative, very motivating, to know that you’re representing your country in front of everyone,” she said.

Jace has covered a slew of sports since he joined the Pioneer Press in May 2015, but his primary duty is covering high schools. Jace enjoys the beat, even though he's been mistaken for a student on multiple occasions.

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